2 Common Web Design Mistakes That Violates Google Adsense Rules

Today I was randomly visiting other blogs and saw that most of bloggers made the same two design mistakes that violates Adsense rules. Majority of the bloggers making the same mistake forced me to write this article.

So, if you Adsense user, you must read this article. Lets start:

First mistake

According to Google policy, we cannot place Google Ads under drop down menus. These drop down menus are generally in navigation menu bar. This generates the risk of accidental clicks. I’ll explain this with the help of a screenshot:

When drop down menu overlaps Google Ads, it may generate the risk of accidental clicks thus taking user to a new site that he/she does not want to visit. You can read more about it on official Adsense Blog. This is the first mistake that most of the bloggers make. Lets move to the other one.

Second Mistake

According to Google, all webmasters must write “ADVERTISEMENT” text below post title. Below is what Google Adsense official blog says:

Ads shouldn’t be placed under a title or section heading in a way that implies that the ads are not ads.

Most of bloggers has ignored this rule also and does not follow this instruction. According to me, you must play safe with Adsense. Good luck!

YOU CAN ALSO SEARCH FOR YOUR DESIRED TOPICS:

Thank you for reading! We welcome and appreciate your comments, but at the same time, make sure you are adding something valuable to this article. If you have any serious queries, suggestions or anything related to this article, feel free to share them, we really appreciate that.

But, if your blog comments are a random "Thank you", "Useful Post", or anything that doesn't actually upscale the article, then we'll be removing them and it won't be appeared below. Thanks for understanding and thanks for connecting with us. If you want to give us any feedback or report any errors, you can kindly contact us and we'll revert back soon.

46 Comments

Well, Google Adsense is a big big source of income for us, but with lack of knowledge, it is just a waste of time. As, in my past I lost my first account due to invalid activity and that was my biggest mistake.

But after that mistake, I learn a lot reading number of tips online and now, I got my new adsense account and I am making some money with it and I hope it will increase with time.

roY battY

Deepanshu@IIT JEE 2011

oh i did the first mistake for 1 day 🙁 (got approved 2 days back only ). will i be forgiven 😕 now i have that rectangulat block above the category bar 🙂 and also the ad under the title…literally everyone is using that …

Technical Tips

Darwin Web Design

This is a great eye opener for all blogger. We need to study carefully the rules and regulation of putting ads to our pages because when Google caught you doing some violation this may give you some trouble. Thanks for that observation.

Sourish

Udegbunam Chukwudi | Make Money Online

I still refuse to believe that there are a whole lot of guys online who don’t know what Google ads looks like. I’ve never confused an adsense block for content even when I was still fresh on the internet.

P.S: Your blog’s new theme looks great though you’re missing the subscribe to comments plug-in 😉

I can imagine people committing the above 2 mistakes, accidentally. But can you believe that there are bloggers who intentionally labels Adsense ads with something like – “More Info”, “Latest News”, “Free Gadgets”… Its suicide…

Ram kumar

Justin

Both the rules you mentioned make sense. Especially the second, not enticing the user with a header or title to trick the user into thinking the ads are something else. There is nothing worse than clicking a link thinking it will take you to an internal page then it goes and takes you to a totally different site…. not cool.

Domain name registration

Lots of people who are using Google Adsense has been banned for violating this rules, I always advise anyone who want to apply for Google Adsense to read the TOS over and over again and make sure that he or her following the rules to the later…

with adsense, its best to follow the rules very strictly, if you want to be with them for a long time. the point here is to avoid accidental clicks, so if any design mistake is causing that, one must look to correct it asap.

Two Hours Of Work And I Got 20+ Loyal Readers To My Blog : Blog Traffic Series Part 20 | Creative Blogging Ideas

[…] the visit, the blogs that I thought needs improvement in the design or violating Google Adsense rules, I dropped the webmaster an email and suggested few ways to improve his/her blog. In the email I […]

Hey Gagan, Can you please tell me where is it mentioned in Google Policy that ads can’t be placed under drop down menus. I checked this page https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=48182&hl=en&sourceid=aso&subid=ww-en-et-storefrontEN_v2_ProgramPoliciesLink&medium=link

Gagan

Cool… I read this one also – http://adsense.blogspot.com/2007/05/clarification-on-accidental-clicks.html But where in this is it mentioned that keeping the ads under drop down menu is a adsense policy violation.

Mike Deeringer, the guy who wrote the adsense post which you mentioned just mentions that it is a tip to avoid accidental clicks. He nowhere mentions it is a violation.

Let me know if I missed reading any line which mentions it is a violation

Narendran.M

@ Hack Tutor

Nothing wrong in placing a drop down menu, the problem is when you place some ads below your drop down menu, it may generate some accidental clicks, as a result when others surfing your blog due to some accidental clicks, it may direct them to some other site/page, so that we are annoying our visitors. The next thing is, one should not click ones own adsense ads, by placing the ads below the drop down menu, there is a chance for you to click it accidentally, so the risk is higher 😉

Gagan Thanks for notifying me last time when I was also doing the same mistakes. I had changed but yesterday again I saw that the dropdown navigation menu was again overlapping since my categories had increased so I deleted the categories. Duh